I've been trying to completely wipe my system clean (delete everything off the harddrive) and reinstall Windows XP on my home laptop. It's on a Dell Inspiron 1150 with Windows XP Home Edition. I'm not very good with XP. In the past with previous versions of Windows I've had (ME & 98) I could just pop in the Windows disk on start up and it would work. I've tried that with the XP disk, but it asks about partitioning...I don't have a clue what that is.

If someone could write me a step by step on how to do this I'd really appreciate it.

Boot to the XP cd, don't worry about partitioning, don't delete any partitions or create any new ones, when it gets to that step pick the existing c: partition, and tell it to install there. It will ask you if you want to format the partition, I always use the NTFS option, not the NTFS (Quick) option, let it format and the install goes from there.

Boot to the XP cd, don't worry about partitioning, don't delete any partitions or create any new ones, when it gets to that step pick the existing c: partition, and tell it to install there. It will ask you if you want to format the partition, I always use the NTFS option, not the NTFS (Quick) option, let it format and the install goes from there.

I tried installing Windows XP onto my Vostro last night (it currently has Vista which is no fun) and it didn't work. I have the XP Pro SP2 CD, and when I booted from the CD, it would say that it didn't find any hard drives on the computer and setup cannot continue.

Anyway I sort of figured it was a hard drive driver thing and I know quite a lot of people had to slipstream XP in order to get it to install. Slipstreaming is a real PITA so I'll probably just deal with Vista for now. Hopefully SP1 fixes a lot of things.

Perhaps your vostro laptop has sata drives, and not pata ones. Windows xp needs a driver to see the sata drives. I'm not sure if this is the problem or not, just an idea.

I know it's the problem, which is why I would have to slipstream an XP CD and I don't really want to have to do that. But the odd thing is, when I had my homebuilt desktop (which used Seagate SATA drives) I never had a problem installing XP.

Okay, now that I've totally wiped the computer clean, it only shows the icon for my recycle bin in the lower right corner. It also doesn't recognize my wireless card so I can't get online with it.

Yes, now you'll need to install drivers for the hardware. Your Dell should have come with a blue CD labeled "System Drivers" or something like that, use it to install the drivers for your onboard devices. You can verify all drivers have been installed by clicking start>control panel>system>hardware tab>device manager and looking for yellow question marks or exclamation points, if none are present then all drivers are installed.

If the CD is missing, go to Dell.com (from a different computer) and search the support section using your model number or service tag number, find and download all drivers, burn them to a cd, or put them on a usb drive, and install them.